Disgrace Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace. New

Disgrace Coetzee, J.M. Disgrace. New York: Penguin, 2000. On the surface, the title of J.M Coetzee's book Disgrace, refers to the disgrace, or fall from grace, that the main character David Lurie has recently experienced in his professional life. From his role as a college professor of some small esteem and income, Lurie has been left with nothing, neither romance nor vocational recourse. However, the title refers to more than what brings the title character to a remote, rural South African farm for abandoned dogs.

It also refers to the ability of cast off beings to redeem the soul of morally bankrupt individuals such as Lurie. Sexual and racial 'others,' and the dogs at the farm, help Lurie to regain his sense of moral responsibility as a father, teacher, and human being. The title's second level or resonance thus also clearly refers to Lurie's lesbian daughter Lucy, who has to some extent chosen her disgrace or marginalized status.

Lucy has taken on a chosen status of disgrace as a woman outside the pale, not simply sexually because of her innate homosexuality, but also because of her own chosen profession as a farmwoman in what is usually a male profession. Lucy has chosen an unconventional life, raising dogs, farming, and running an animal shelter. She gives refuge to the unwanted, and her own father becomes one of these unwanted 'lost dogs,' just as she was the unwanted progeny of one of his two dissolved marriages.

At first, Coetzee's professor marveled that an intelligent woman should chose such a life, but Lucy's choice becomes an initial stroke of luck for him, as he would have no where else to go, had not Lucy begun her dog shelter.

Despite his disapproval of the girl's supposed waste of her life, and his own evident distaste for physical work on the farm and at the shelter, Lurie's own professional actions also seem to be unconsciously designed bring his own disgrace and socially marginal status upon his own head -- he selected an unstable female student to court and woo. He has an affair with the girl while she is still in one of his classes.

The girl reports the affair, and the professor is of course dismissed from his teaching duties as a legal liability and an abuser of his role as a trustworthy evaluator of student work. Lurie's desire to bring disgrace upon his own head seems to be by design when Lurie met his objectors with little defense or resistance. When asked by his superiors why he did such a thing, he dismisses the severity of the action of sexual relations with the student, rather than begging either their apology or pity.

Even if one is inclined to emotionally sympathize with Lurie, if morally abhor his action, his disgrace from his position is both poignant yet seemingly inevitable, given the stagnancy his teaching had lapsed into, over the years. In contrast to Lucy, Lurie lacks vitality and a sense of mission in what he does, thus he becomes disgraced. But merely because Lucy loves her work does not mean that she can avoid calamity.

The issue of sexual disgrace again arises after the Lurie's daughter is raped, in a fashion that causes him to further call into question the issues of female sexuality and male protectiveness from a father's rather than a lover's point-of-view. Lurie realizes he was totally helpless to physically protect his daughter from sexual molestation. As a man and a father, he could not save Lucy from unwanted sexual danger, seemingly confirming what he sees as her apparent distrust and dislike of men.

At first, Lurie feels like he is no longer a man. As an object of romantic fascination, he is growing older in the eyes of women, and his female students rejected him -- one of the reasons he 'pounced' upon his seemingly last chance at love.

Lurie's academic career was long failing, but Lucy's rape mean that now he is completely reduced, in his eyes, to an utterly useless being, a man with no power in his body, heart, and even his mind -- a state of inner and outer alienation and disgrace from any kind of social identity. Ironically, Lurie's specialty is 19th Century Romantic literature, a literature that attempted to celebrate the human capacity for feeling and championed social outsiders.

However, the university Lurie taught at, which began as a proper school of learning, was demoted to a technical school by the time he found his desired student. Rather than teach the real words and real thoughts of great thinkers Lurie had to mouth the words enunciated in the Communications 101 handbook, that human beings, with so-called basic training, were easily capable of communicating in society about their feelings and intentions.

Lurie could not even believe what he spoke to his classes, for he knew that he had used literature and language to cover up such impulses of direct communication.